Cover image for Title

Nocturne

A Journey in Search of Moonlight

JAMES ATTLEE

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

MOONRISE

Sky Maps and Ghost Ships

PART ONE: SYZIGY

A Three-Dog Night by the River

A Barefoot Galileo

Absorbed by Its Shadows

Earthshine

Eostre and a Paschal Moon

A White Horse and Mammoth Bones

Fear of the Dark

Darkness and the Desert: An Islamic Moon

Mussolini, the Madonna and Moonlight

Extollagers in the Valley of Vision: Memory, Moonlight and Samuel Palmer

Dark Adaption and the Eye of the Beholder

The Path of Totality

Adrift on the Iapetus Ocean

August Beach Moon, Normandy

Immaculate Conceptions and Transparent Moons

Let’s Murder the Moonlight! Futurists and the Moon

The Agency of the Night

PART TWO: TSUKIMI

Beyond the Gateless Gate: September Kyoto Moon

Cats’ Eyes and a McDonald’s Moon

PART THREE: VESUVIO

The Alarming Mountain: Naples, Vesuvius and the Moon

PART FOUR: LUNADA

From Vegas to Vega: American Moon

The Moon and the Standing People

PART FIVE: MONDSCHEIN

Raking the Shadows: A Romantic Moon

PART SIX: THAMESIS

Through Midnight Streets: The Thames and a London Moon

MOONSET

Blue Moon on Stonewall Hill

Acknowledgements

Permissions

By the same author

Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey

Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between

(with Lisa Le Feuvre)

For Rosemary and David

Moonrise

Sky Maps and Ghost Ships

Strange indeed are the places that give birth to the ideas that later, for better or worse, find physical form as books. I first encountered my subject lying on my back in a dentist’s chair. In an effort to distract the minds of those undergoing treatment, the dentist in question had attached a large photographic poster to the ceiling depicting the earth at night, seen from space. It is to this distant yet familiar world that his patients cast their eyes, sometimes blurred by tears, sometimes pre-naturally sharpened by the effort of ignoring their discomfort. What they learn is that much of the planet we inhabit no longer experiences ‘night’ as it was once understood. Ever-increasing swathes of it are bathed in artificial light twenty-four hours a day and glitter like amber jewels when observed from the air; only the great deserts and oceans offer large areas of darkness. Those of us who inhabit these regions of eternal day (most of us, in other words) are increasingly cut off from the movements of the silent satellite that controls the tides, linked in the human mind for centuries with love, melancholy and madness. So if you asked what it was that inspired me to write about moonlight I would tell you that it was not the moon at all but an absence of moon, as well as of stars, meteorites and the rest of the celestial light show rendered spectrally pale today by the intensity of our self-regard.

This was one defining moment; the next was as unlike it as the range of an ordinary life allows. I was walking with a friend one hot August night along the coastal path that borders that rugged and isolated promontory in Cornwall that is named, for reasons rendered obscure by the passage of time, the Lizard. The air was rich with the smell of gorse and the scent of the springy turf that bordered the path; to our right the ground fell away in a steep slope, punctuated by rocky outcrops, which ended abruptly in a sheer cliff down to the sea. As we rounded a corner we were both halted mid-stride by what lay before us. Looking out across the ocean we saw what appeared to be the lights of a great ship approaching, glowing orange across the water. We had been idly tracking the movement of vessels all day, as visitors to the coast will do, pleasure craft and small fishing boats mostly; we had seen nothing of this size. As we watched, we realized our eyes had been playing tricks on us. What we were seeing was the rim of the harvest moon emerging from the sea, a monstrous, swollen apparition, its shape distorted by the atmospheric conditions; glowing and pulsing like an ember, craters and canyons were clearly visible on its surface like purple veins. We stood for a few minutes before hurrying back along the path to the house where we were staying and calling our friends outside to toast the moon as it wobbled up into the sky. Later that night I was woken by the mournful bellow of a foghorn. Going to the window I saw that the moon had changed colour from tangerine to silver and was casting a blade of light over the perfectly still sea, across which a solid wall of fog was advancing towards the shore. On this night at least, in this distant corner of our crowded, congested archipelago, the moon still reigned supreme.

Despite all the technological advances and new forms of entertainment our world offers, the majority of humankind still retreat into the cocoons of their dwellings for a good portion of the hours of darkness. Few step outside expressly to study the night sky. My walk along the Cornish cliffs made me think that perhaps there was a report I could bring back from this abandoned field. Was I tired of the urban landscape? Not really. Riding my bicycle through glass canyons painted with reflections, beneath bridges on which the windows of silver trains are strung like brightly coloured beads, I wouldn’t have said so. But I was also looking for the real night, not the man-made one, however much it had engaged me all these years; the night that was bigger than people and that dated from before their presence on the planet. Particularly those, almost as bright as day, when the earth was bathed in the unearthly phosphorescence we call moonlight. For countless millennia humankind has lived in step with the cycles of the moon, planting crops, wooing lovers and gathering harvests according to its celestial clockwork. It is scarcely more than a century since this connection was decisively broken, since we turned our back on the sky and our faces towards the brilliantly illuminated interiors of our own homes. I resolved to make a note of the lunar calendar, so that I would be aware of when to expect moonlit nights and make sure to walk abroad in them as much as I could. I would grow familiar with the nocturnal sky, so long the true traveller’s calendar and compass, that to me was as illegible as a page of Braille to a sighted man. I would look to those artists that had succeeded in capturing the essence of moonlight before it had been so nearly erased from our brightly lit world.

I have always found something attractively perverse about artistic works that portray the hours of darkness, something that seems contrary to a universal guiding principle. Painters, sculptors, artists of all kinds seek well-lit studios and sunlight, not the ‘pale fire’ that Shakespeare wrote of in Timon of Athens, snatched by the moon from its flame-headed, blazing cousin. After all, moonlight does not reveal, in the straight-ahead, visual sense; it transforms, changing colours and contours in its shape-shifting light. Artists who have chosen to portray the moon have seen it either as a symbol or an opportunity, its presence a gateway to another visual universe. I hoped that if I re-established a lost connection with the moon, a connection still written into my genes, and spent time in its alchemical light, I too might learn to read the world in a different way.

What follows therefore is an account of a fragmentary journey, dictated by the moon’s phases, as subject to prevailing weather conditions as to my own personal circumstances. It is as much a record of moonlight encountered between the pages of books, evoked on canvas, by a camera or in music as it is a nocturnal travelogue. ‘Night,’ wrote Kenneth Clark, ‘is not a subject for naturalistic painting.’* Moonlight, similarly, is a subject almost universally regarded as off-limits to contemporary writers, too kitsch, debased and sentimental to be worthy of serious consideration. This alone would seem to make it a subject worth exploring.

PART ONE

Syzigy

A Three-Dog Night by the River

The moon is said to be in syzigy when she is in conjunction or opposition with the sun.

Falconer’s New Universal Dictionary of the Marine, 1815 Edition

By afternoon it has clouded over and turned bitterly cold. The sky releases a fine drizzle that feels as if it may turn to snow. It has been a heavy week and I feel exhausted by doing simple chores; it seems enough to get to the end of a shopping list, wheeling my bike along the street from the farmers’ market to the grocery store. I haven’t made any special plans for observing the full moon even though it falls on a Saturday, but over the preceding days I have been aware of a subliminal sense of anticipation. Coming home in the evenings beneath the waxing moon I have looked upwards and reminded myself that I have an assignation. But now it seems that we are set to have one of those nights when the city is shut in beneath a lid of low-lying cloud that bounces the sulphurous light of the street lamps back down to us, so that we are condemned to simmer in our own electronic bouillabaisse. Mentally I have already let go of this night, written it off, resigned to spending the evening in front of a televisual window on the world rather than beneath the sky. Once our son is in bed we sit down to watch a DVD. A Chinese film, it is set in a neon-lit landscape of fast-food joints, subways, bars, sweatshops and tiny apartments, an almost entirely nocturnal world that never shows the night sky. Some of the chase scenes are filmed in a kind of jerking slow motion so that the lights blur and smear and create new colours, becoming themselves the film’s primary subject. The motivation of the characters remains obscure; genres are shuffled, the sub-plot becomes the main plot and the main plot seems to evaporate. When it finishes we decide to go to bed. I am standing brushing my teeth by the glass-panelled back door when I notice that my feet are spotlit in a pool of silver. I go outside and find that the sky has almost cleared; the moon is high, shining through a thin cloud cover. The temperature has caused what astronomers call a corona to form; moonlight is being refracted through hexagonal ice crystals in the high cloud, creating a circle around the moon that glints purple and gold. The light spilling out from the house and from the houses on either side over the garden fence extends about eighteen feet along the ground; then the moonlight takes over. The garden backs on to allotments that are not lit at night, creating a shadowland where foxes prowl and screech and moonbeams are not entirely robbed of their potency. The bulk of a climbing rose is grey but the raindrops caught in its leaves sparkle, each a tiny reservoir of mercury. The small fig that grows against the windowless wall of the extension is silhouetted, its bare branches, studded with small hard fruit that failed to ripen in the miserably wet summer, casting sharply defined Japanese shadows on the wall.

I decide to take a midnight walk; I want to get away from the lights, see the moon reflected in the waters of the river, as so many artists before have done. To his surprise the family dog is roused from his basket to accompany me. Traditionally, for aboriginal Australians, the temperature of the hours of darkness is described as being a one-dog night, a two-dog night or, in particularly cold seasons, a three-dog night, depending on how many dogs would have been required to keep a man warm in the days when he would have slept outside, in the bush. For all I know this may be colder than it ever gets in Australia but all I have for company as I set out is a trembling, neurotic whippet that shies at every shadow. As soon as I step out of my front door I realize I will have to walk some distance to re-enter the moonlight. The moon has power in the garden only because it is shielded from the glare of the street lights in the lee of the house; I am now entering a world painted in an orange, sodium glow. Then I notice that in the shade of each parked car a tiny pool of moonlight remains. The street lights project from the edge of the road while the moon is directly above. Moonshine infiltrates between the patches of artificial light; yet it is diluted, robbed of its strength. Those still abroad at this late hour have their heads down, their collars turned up. It is easy to forget the presence of the moon above you when you are distanced, immunized against its touch.

I take the bridge across the river. I have never noticed before how brightly lit it is; completely empty, every inch of it is illuminated, its lights writhing in the water below like burning lanterns. The occasional car swishes by, its headlights out-dazzled. What a profligate civilization we are, burning up our resources to light streets that nobody walks down and shop-window displays that nobody sees, pouring light on the empty pavements as a ritual oblation to the god of money. This is the senseless waste of energy through which we rob the world of moonlight. Gratefully I take a path down the steep embankment and drop into the relative darkness on the riverbank. This is what I have been seeking: around a quarter of a mile of path running between the river and a water meadow where the City Council’s compulsion to banish darkness and ensure public safety has been curbed.

Within a couple of minutes of leaving the bridge behind, every puddle burns with its own miniature flame. Such reflections have fascinated mankind for countless centuries. Astrologers in the Middle Ages claimed they were ‘scrying the moon’, predicting the future by noting the position of the markings on the lunar disc’s face (which of course never changed) when its image was observed in standing water. Tonight the river has become a looking glass; the trees along the opposite bank stand on their heads, their reflections photographic negatives from a pre-digital age.

Ahead of me on the path I can see a lamp post, lighting the way into the garden of a waterside pub that given the hour has long since fallen as silent as the Egyptian divinity that gives it, and this stretch of the river, its name. For the ancient Egyptians the sky itself was formed by the gracefully curved body of a female divinity, variously named Nut or Hathor, who touched the earth only with the tips of her fingers and toes and whose belly was girded with stars. This belly dance of stars seems to me a ridiculously beautiful idea. However, Nut was not without her troubles. She fell in love with her twin brother, Geb, the earth god, and married him without the permission of their father, Ra, who was so enraged that he decreed that Nut would not be able to give birth to a child on any given day of the year. According to Plutarch, however, Thoth took pity on her. Playing draughts in a long series of games with the moon, he won a seventy-second part of its light; with this as his raw material he created five extra days that did not belong to the official 360-day Egyptian calendar. Nut wasted no time, giving birth to a child on each of them: Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys. (It is Isis, of course, who gives her name to both the river and the pub I stand between.) I stop, reluctant to re-enter the tangerine smog the lamp emits; at the precise moment I pause, under the mournful, long-suffering gaze of the whippet, who himself has the head of an Egyptian god, it switches off. I walk up to it and watch in amazement as the glow of its orange filament dims and the dark rushes back in from under the trees. There seems to be no particular logic to explain why this lamp should be programmed to switch off at this time while those behind and ahead of me still burn. What it tells me is that every one of these lights shut down or knocked out is another few yards won back for the moonlight. And it comes to me then, in a city that retains so much of its medieval fabric and boasts its own observatory, how wonderful it would be to switch this useless light show off and regain the night sky, freeing ourselves to experience once more the silvery touch of earth’s nearest neighbour. Doubtless, negotiation with the earthly powers that decree the night be lit would prove as difficult a game as any Thoth played against the moon. Could those prepared to engage in it hope to win from them some unlit nights, as Thoth won Nut her days? And what might be born when we had created such a space?

A Barefoot Galileo

The nature of the moon has been a subject of conjecture for philosophers and poets from the dawn of written history. That the truth of their speculations could not be verified gave them licence to entertain widely divergent theories, some writers holding a number of apparently contradictory possibilities in balance at the same time. In Plutarch’s ‘On the Face that Appears in the Orb of the Moon’, a cast of characters representing all fields of knowledge both report and satirize a number of ‘popular notions that are in everybody’s mouth’ concerning the moon, whether derived from ancient sources or folk legend. They start by discussing the widely held belief that the face of a man or a maiden is discernible on the lunar disc; they decide that this notion cannot be a mere affectation of sight caused by the moon’s brightness, as those with weak eyes are less able to discern its features, meaning the face-like markings have physical existence. At the same time they are under no illusion that the face itself is real. Thus the moon must be something like a shadow-puppet screen or a magic lantern in the sky. Another belief held by the ancients that they discuss and dismiss is that the full moon is a mirror, ‘of all mirrors, in point of polish and of brilliancy the most beautiful and the most clear’, and that its so-called face is ‘only reflected images and appearances of the great sea’. This early link between the moon and water reverses a pictorial tradition later to become significant in Western art, in which water reflects the moon. In addition they mention the idea that the moon is composed of glass or ice and that the light of heaven shines through it, making the moon a lens and moonlight the projected illumination of another world. A magic lantern, a mirror or a lens; it is as though the moon from the earliest times was pointing towards the as yet undiscovered science of optics, urging men to increase the power of their limited vision, calling out look at me, discover me.

It was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that men devised the first instruments that allowed mankind to extend its vision to other worlds. The magnification power of Galileo Galilei’s first refracting spyglasses,* constructed variously from lead or strips of wood, covered with intricately tooled leather (for those he wished to present as gifts to potential patrons) or paper, was weak by today’s standards. His first attempt, made using standard lenses purchased from spectacle-makers’ workshops, gave only a magnification power of 3X. Had he chosen to turn this instrument towards the night sky, the detail he would have been able to observe of the lunar maria (large plains on the surface of the moon, visible from earth by the naked eye, formerly believed to be seas) would have been scarcely greater than that visible to the naked eye. Fortunately he did not rest with his first attempt, but strove to improve the efficiency of his ‘tubes’, using his knowledge of optics to grind and polish the lenses himself. By the end of the summer in 1609 he had managed to achieve a magnification of 8X or 9X, putting him ahead of the competition (instruments that could magnify 3X or 4X had already appeared for sale in Venice). The engine that drove him was not purely a love of science but the single-minded desire to advance his career. Initially, at least, the best way of doing this seemed to be to win the favour of the ruling powers of the Republic. Galileo was a man with responsibilities – he had his sisters’ dowries to pay for and three children by his mistress to support, all on the limited income of a university professorship in mathematics. He offered his own instrument to the Doge of Venice as a weapon to add to his arsenal, the missile defence shield of its day. ‘This is a thing of inestimable benefit for all transactions and undertakings,’ he wrote in a letter to the Doge, ‘maritime or terrestrial, allowing us at sea to discover at a much greater distance than usual the hulls and sails of the enemy, so that for two hours or more we can detect him before he detects us …’

By the end of the same year Galileo had created a telescope with 20X magnification. This was the instrument with which he began his voyage of exploration into the heavens. I like to imagine the moment when he turned his improved spyglass on the moon and the silent planet swam into the watery orbit of his eye. Stripped of mystery, obfuscation and philosophical debate, naked, shivering perhaps through the transmitted trembling of his hand* (although he had devised a tripod to minimize this problem), the moon was revealed to be, what? Much like the earth; its surface irregular, marked by chains of mountains and deep valleys, geographical features a man could walk among if only he could devise a way to reach it. Once and for all the Aristotelian notion that the heavens were perfect and unchangeable, while only the earth was the realm of corruption and decay, was rendered untenable. Before long, Galileo’s vision had reached beyond the lunar plane and discovered four new stars. Not that these were, as he explained in his dedication to his book Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) in 1610,

of the common sort and multitude of the less notable fixed stars, but of the illustrious order of wandering stars, which, indeed, make their journeys and orbits with a marvellous speed around the star of Jupiter, the most noble of them all, with mutually different motions, like children of the same family, while meanwhile all together, in mutual harmony, complete their great revolutions every twelve years about the centre of the world, that is, about the Sun itself.

By discovering that Jupiter was orbited by its own moons, Galileo dethroned the earth from absolute rule at the centre of the spinning, singing firmament, providing compelling support for a Copernican view of the universe. At one stroke he earned himself international fame and the undying enmity of certain members of the Catholic hierarchy. He was first reported to the Inquisition in 1616 and warned to abandon his heliocentric view of the universe. In 1632 he was reported again for his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which presents the theories of Copernicus as superior to those of Ptolemy. He was condemned for ‘a vehement suspicion of heresy’ and had to make a dramatic recantation of his opinions before the inquisitors to save his skin.

In his old age, already blind and held under house arrest, Galileo was visited in Tuscany by another defender of regicide, the young Puritan poet John Milton. Milton himself of course would later go blind, having lost his eyes ‘overplied / In liberty’s defense’, as he himself put it in his twenty-second sonnet, as Secretary of Foreign Tongues in Cromwell’s government. The poet also found himself out of step with worldly powers; after the Restoration, a republican in a monarchical age, his books were burned in public by the hangman and he narrowly escaped execution. We have no record of the conversation between the scientist and the poet. Their meeting is immortalized in Paradise Lost in a few brief lines, in which Milton writes of Satan’s shield, which

Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb

Through Optic Glass the Tuscan artist views

At ev’ning from the top of Fesole,

Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,

Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.

At first, verification of the worlds opened up by this new technology was limited to those in possession of rare scientific equipment; others had to rely on the accounts of these virtual explorers of the regions beyond the earth. In England, a little over a decade after Galileo’s discoveries, Robert Burton, that great accumulator of all knowledge both ancient and contemporary, wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy with characteristic caution that ‘they find by their glasses that maculae facie luna, [the spots on the face of the moon] the brighter parts are earth, the dusky sea, which Thales, Plutarch, and Pythagoras formerly taught; and manifestly discern hills and dales, and suchlike concavities, if we may believe and subscribe to Galileo’s observations’. It did not take long, however, for Galileo’s ideas to percolate through the consciousness of Europe, shifting our understanding of the universe for ever. In the land of his birth, he has made an extraordinary journey since his death, from villain to hero, from heretic to saint.

The magnitude of the shift in his status is brought home to me when I visit an exhibition dedicated to his legacy held at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. There I see a copy from the original run of Siderius Nuncius, on loan from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale; examples of his telescopes; and, most extraordinary of all, a remnant of his physical being, its presence an indication of the reverence he has attained since his death. The severed middle finger from the astronomer’s right hand, still pointing upwards, is preserved beneath a bubble of glass at the top of an alabaster reliquary. The finger was separated from his remains by a provost named Anton Francesco Gori when Galileo’s body was transferred from its obscure resting place under the bell tower of Santa Croce to a monumental tomb in the nave of the Basilica in 1737. It next fell into the hands of a librarian named Bandini, was passed to the Tribuna di Galileo in 1841 and eventually came to rest in the Museo di Storia della Scienza, now the Museo Galileo, in Florence. The inscription on the base of the reliquary praises Galileo’s scientific and moral virtues, exonerating him by implication from the charges of the Inquisition. The finger, withered and twisted with age, is a holy relic. So deeply embedded is man’s religious impulse that when religion itself is dethroned we beatify scientists instead.

Even today, when telescopes far more powerful than Galileo’s are available for the cost of an ordinary meal in a local restaurant, most of us remain unacquainted with the stars at first hand. I never owned or even looked through an astronomical telescope as a child and I am sure that this is not unusual. In an age when men have devised ships able to carry us across the ocean of space that divides us from our nearest cousin, when they have planted flags, collected rocks and lolloped in the lunar dust, sending back their indifferent holiday snaps to earth, it is clear that most of us remain unimpressed. The first time I observed the moon through any kind of lens was 396 years after Galileo constructed his first telescope, when I stood beneath an ancient plum tree in central France (its fruit a dark constellation shedding overripe asteroids at my feet) and turned a pair of second-hand binoculars on the sky. The full moon floated above the hillside on which I stood and I gave it my considered attention as a student of nature, in the words of The Starry Messenger. Through the glasses it appeared very different to the way it did to the naked eye; as far as I could discern it seemed to be made of some kind of ceramic material, possibly punched with holes, lit from within by an internal light source and marked with depressions not unlike purple thumbprints. So this was astronomy! But I was no astronomer; I seemed to be deficient in both equipment and knowledge. The sky was studded with stars but the only constellation I could name with any confidence was the Plough, which as a child I had known as the Frying Pan. I was not the first human that, on being confronted by the book of nature, was able to learn little but the extent of their own ignorance.

My next close encounter with earth’s satellite didn’t take place until two days before Christmas in 2007. We had accepted an invitation to a seasonal drink with a friend who had recently returned from living overseas, to a house a few doors from our own. The full moon was due to fall on Christmas Eve and I was wondering if I would find time amid social commitments to sneak out of doors and walk beneath its light. At the same time another, nagging voice in my head was telling me to abandon the project altogether, to forget the moon and moonlight and find something sensible to write about. As we left our door I noticed that the weather was perfect for lunar observation, crisp and clear, the nearly full moon riding overhead, ringed with faint cloud. The party had been in full swing since the afternoon, the remains of a meal lay on the table and most of the guests either sat around a fire indoors or stood by a brazier in the garden where they were free to smoke and talk and look up at the stars. We were greeted warmly and introduced to our friend’s new companion, a congenial host, who was padding around barefoot with plates of food, drink and logs for the fire. However, I was almost immediately distracted by an object in the corner; the long, dark barrel of a telescope as thick as my arm, standing on a neatly folded tripod. Our host noticed my interest (I have never been good at concealing such things) and explained that he had recently purchased it for thirty-five pounds in a car-boot sale, complete with spare lenses. With faultless hospitality, despite the fact that he had been busy looking after his guests all evening, he offered to set it up in the garden. We carried it out of the back door, along with our bottles of beer; I was a little concerned on account of his bare feet as the ground outside was frozen hard, but he didn’t appear to notice. The telescope was assembled swiftly. A fairly cheap Chinese model with a wooden tripod, it must have been several years old, but as it was my first encounter with any such instrument I was deeply impressed. My host bent over the lens, aligned the telescope and then stood back for me to take a look. How can I describe what I saw? The surface of the moon filled my field of vision, seemingly almost within reach. For the first time, like Galileo, I saw the craters invisible to the naked eye upon its surface and individual volcano-like mountains, of the size and definition of the barnacles you might find on the side of a boat. So this is the country moonlight comes from, I thought. I am not superstitious, except in so far as any writer is superstitious about the project they are working on, but I couldn’t help finding it extraordinary that a telescope should arrive in the street where I lived at precisely the time when I was wondering whether the moon and its light were a proper subject for my book. A few days later I got a text message on my phone. ‘We are sitting in the pub,’ it read, ‘and wondering whether you would like to borrow the telescope for a while?’

Absorbed by Its Shadows

For a deity that is so often addressed, admired and speculated upon, the moon remains remarkably unresponsive. Only in Lucian’s Icaromenippus do we glimpse its frustration at being the centre of so much human attention and its wish to be allowed to sail on its way undisturbed, a Garbo of the skies. Menippus, himself frustrated at the lack of information he is able to find on the nature of the heavens, has ascended to the moon by strapping on mismatching but symbolically important wings, one from an eagle and one from a vulture. Just as he is about to leave the lunar surface, having had his fill of diverting himself by looking down at the activities of the people of earth, the moon calls out to him, asking him to bear a message to Zeus for her. She has, she explains, had enough of overhearing the spurious theories of scientists about her nature. ‘They seem to have nothing to do but poke their noses into my affairs. They’re always wanting to know who I am, what my measurements are and why my figure keeps changing into a semi-circle or a crescent. Some of them say I’m infested with living organisms, others that I’m a sort of mirror suspended over the sea …’ In short, she wants Zeus to ‘rub out those scientists, put a gag on those logicians, demolish the Stoa, burn down the Academy and stop those Peripatetics walking around all the time. Then I might be safe from their offensive calculations.’

Sadly, human behaviour has not improved; today the moon is at risk from more than words. Towards the end of 2009, American scientists crashed a 2,200 kg rocket into the permanently shadowed Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole. The rocket was followed into the crater by a probe, which collected samples from the plume of debris shot upwards from the impact. To the great excitement of NASA scientists, the probe detected water molecules, which may have great implications for the sustainability of any moon colony that is established to mine the moon for its natural resources. The most significant of these is a substance called helium-3, which might be extracted by opencast mining and used to power energy generation back on earth. As many voices are now pointing out, such activities would swiftly destroy the pristine ecology of the moon, unchanged for billions of years. Meanwhile, as scientists analyse their discoveries, the rocket and its attendant probe will remain, joining the growing pile of junk left on the lunar surface by previous visitors. All of this garbage, from abandoned moon-buggies to spacesuits, cameras and even defecation-collection bags, is granted an eternal non-life by the thinness of the satellite’s atmosphere. (I suppose we should not be surprised that the American astronauts, commissioned to plant their county’s flag, should further mark their territory by shitting on the moon.) It is thought that as long as they avoid a direct asteroid hit or future human development on the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin’s footprints could remain visible for hundreds of thousands of years, ready to spook a future Robinson Crusoe washed up on lunar shores.

Today I have come to Modern Art Oxford to see a work by British artist Katie Paterson, in which the moon at last plays an active rather than a passive role, making its own mark on one of the great icons of European culture. Paterson, in a work that effortlessly combines poetry with technology, has translated each note of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Opus 27 no. 2, better known as the ‘Moonlight Sonata’, into its musical letters, which in turn have been turned into Morse code. The code was then transmitted to the moon using an EME (earth–moon–earth) radio communication system from a ‘moon station’ in Southampton, England. The signal was reflected off the moon’s surface (a process called moonbounce) and received back on earth at a station in Sweden, 480,000 miles and 2.5 seconds later. However, this was not just a game of interplanetary catch. The music has changed. It bears the imprint of its journey. As Paterson puts it in some accompanying notes in the gallery, ‘the moon reflects only part of the information back – some of it is absorbed by its shadows, lost in its craters’.

In the centre of the gallery space stands a solitary Disklavier grand piano, trailing the wires that link it to a computer. Remote, electronic fingers depress the keys, filling the room with the opening section of the Sonata, the movement that Beethoven marked ‘Adagio Sostenuto’, in which the haunting, impossibly simple melody floats above an ever-changing sequence of three-note clusters. It was this section that earned the Sonata the title ‘Moonlight’, when the critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab likened listening to it to the experience of gliding across the shimmering surface of Lake Lucerne in a boat at night, surrounded by the spectrally lit mountain landscape. Yet the music we are hearing has undergone a change, an extraterrestrial remix. Parts of the piece have simply been erased on its journey, inserting sections of emptiness where none existed before; spaces that speak of the distance the music has travelled on its journey. Curiously the transformation is rather successful; the construction of the original piece is of a robustness that allows it to sustain such editing. Indeed, it emerges from its lunar encounter in a form that is arguably more arresting to twenty-first-century ears than the original, rather as some buildings only come into their own when seen as ruins. Cultural artefacts gain an aura of authenticity through the patina that time bestows. Unlike works of visual art, however, music that is written down can be created afresh again and again – although the shift in the sensibilities of conductors and orchestra leaders, the increasing loudness of musical instruments and the changing fashions in the manner in which they are played adds a veneer of cultural interpretation, like a thick and discoloured varnish on a painting, over the composer’s original intentions. Now, with Paterson’s help, the moon has given us a radical rereading of this much-loved work, revealing it for what it is; a piece of musical architecture as brittle as any classical ruin, that crumbles in the fingers like dust, while retaining the power to haunt our dreams.

Across town in the Bodleian Library, I come across another meeting between art, the moon and music. A recent acquisition, it is a rare illustrated autograph of a song by Felix Mendelssohn, decorated by the composer himself with a watercolour of a moonlit lake. ‘Schilflied’, translated as ‘Reed Song’, was composed in 1842, to words by Nikolaus Lenan. The lyric begins ‘On the lake’s unruffled surface rests the moon’s fair beam’, and it is this scene that Mendelssohn has painted, wrapping his depiction of the lake and its surroundings around and even between the musical staves; the drooping branches of a willow trail over the 6/8 time signature and a stand of trees extends its branches between the bird-tracks of musical notes, brushing against the words andante con moto. The whole vista is dramatically lit with the moon itself a white circle against an inky sky. The neutral paper, the ground on which the music is written, provides Mendelssohn with his moonlight effects on the water. Two elusive, ethereal substances that travel through space to reach our senses, moonlight and music, are captured and combined on this sheet of paper, itself one of the most miraculous creations of human civilization. Somehow, Mendelssohn implies, if music can emulate moonlight to the ear, and moonlight can infiltrate music on the page, and if the page itself can both bear the fragile imprint of music and stand in for the brightness of moonlight, then these things are connected. The task the composer has set me is to find out how.

Earthshine

After a blustery start to the month, ten days into February we enjoy a few days of false spring; the wind drops and it is warm enough to sit outside at lunchtime on the deck of a boat perched on a mudbank in the Thames in central London. Cormorants at the tideline hold out one ragged black wing at a time to absorb the unaccustomed warmth and a heron picks its way through the shallow water with the gait of a preoccupied parson, hands clasped behind his back. I sit basking in the sun, looking upriver towards Vauxhall Bridge; the water is dazzling and exhales a golden mist and the span of the heavy bridge, glinting with slow-moving traffic, is resolved into the delicate arc of a wooden footbridge in a Japanese woodcut. I imagine myself with Whistler in the rowing boat sculled by his studio assistants on the river not far from this spot, as he journeyed out on the tide in sun, fog and moonlight, composing the riverscapes that were homages to the effects of light on water. The crescent moon appears, as thin and sharp as a fingernail, as I cycle back through Hyde Park that night. For the next few days we are treated to a display of a phenomenon known to present-day astronomers as ‘earthshine’ and to the ancients as ‘ashen light’; the light of the sun, reflected from the earth, is dimly illuminating the body of the moon, so that a ghost image of the whole of the shaded planet is visible above the bright sliver that is catching the sun’s rays. The new moon is ‘carrying the old moon in its arms’. It is as though a kohl-painted siren was partly opening one heavy-lidded, gleaming eye to gaze coquettishly down at the earth. The weather changes once more and the night temperatures drop below freezing, with perfectly clear skies. The moon, now waxing fuller, is present during the day, rising above the rooftops by two o’clock in the afternoon against a perfectly blue sky. The cold, dry air is perfect for lunar observation; Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitas, the two ‘eyes’ of the face of the man in the moon, are clearly visible without the aid of a telescope; below them Mare Cognitum and Mare Nubium appear towards the terminator line. In the early afternoon the massive craters take on the colour of the sky itself, a delicate, pale blue, as if they really were seas, as their names suggest. This daylight moon, the colour of frost, seems brittle as a wafer dissolving on the tongue. Towards dusk, as the sky fades and the light of the moon intensifies, the lunar seas take on the deep mauve of a bruise.

A little short of a week before full moon some friends come to visit. At around half-past midnight, conversation turns to my current preoccupation. I suggest getting the telescope out and to my surprise someone agrees. At this hour the moon, which travels about the span of an outstretched hand each night, hangs outside my back door, over the garden fence. We fumble at the telescope with frozen fingers, attempting to calibrate it, until a gleam from the eyepiece confirms we have locked into position. Was it this phenomenon, this surprising and sudden brightness in the eyepiece of a telescope, that suggested to Milton the comparison between the moon and Satan’s highly polished shield? Like me, my friend has rarely if ever pointed any optical device at the lunar surface and is gratifyingly awestruck at what we can discern. One side of a crater on the terminator line, its edge catching the sun’s rays, is sharply defined in shadow; to our imperfect vision its illuminated rim appears almost like a hoop, rising from the planet’s surface. We puzzle over what we are looking at, arriving at an interpretation as much by the application of logic as by the evidence of our eyes, much as Galileo did, returning to the party both chilled and dazzled.

Eostre and a Paschal Moon

In 2008, Easter falls very early, on 23 March – the first time it has done so since 1913. Anyone wondering why they are shivering their way through the long weekend has the moon to blame. The general rule for calculating the date of Easter was set at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325: from that date on, it was decreed that Easter Sunday would fall on the first Sunday after the full moon, known as the Paschal Moon, which fell on or after the spring equinox. To complicate things further, the early Church decided that the spring equinox would always be set as 21 March, even though in reality the date shifted slightly each year. This means that Easter can fall as early as the last week of March, when in the northern hemisphere snow might still be falling, or as late as the end of April, when spring is well advanced. Full moon in 2008 falls exactly on 21 March, so that Good Friday and the spring equinox inhabit the same space in the year and Easter is almost as early as it can possibly be (it last fell a day earlier on 22 March in 1818).

This linkage between the Christian festival, the coming of spring and the lunar cycle is rich in both metaphorical and historical resonance. In De Temporum Ratione, his treatise on the calculation of time written in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede claimed that the name for Easter came from the Anglo-Saxon deity Eostre, who had been worshipped with feasting at the spring equinox in times prior to his own. There seems little reason to doubt his word; why would he, after all, credit a pagan goddess with the origin of the name of the most important Christian celebration without good reason? If he had been as skilful at looking into the future as he was at looking into the past, it is hard to imagine what he would have made of the transformation that has taken place in the Easter festival of today. Eostre, associated with the growing light of spring, is very much present, something that would have been shocking to one dedicated to the project of Christianizing these islands. Her sacred hare is everywhere, disguised in cartoon clothes as an Easter bunny.

To further confuse the eighth-century cleric, the festival’s pre-Christian elements have been skewed by the intervention of capitalism. The eggs, symbols of new life and associated very early on with this time of year, have been touched by its magic wand and changed into chocolate. Instead of being a time when first crops would be planted and the hearth forsaken, when young women would take to the woods and collect the ‘holy tide’ of water from the brook that had the power to restore youth, Eostre, like Christmas, has become a time of feasting. We would rather wax fat than dance or pray. But perhaps this is not such an irrational response to world events. As the climate changes and water levels rise, it could be that evolution is responding and turning full circle; by gaining extra layers of blubber, the people of the richer nations, sleek as seals, may be getting ready to return to the water once again.

A White Horse and Mammoth Bones

The moonbeams kilter i’ the lift,

An Earth, the bare auld stane

Glitters aneath the seas o space

White as a mammoth’s bane.

Hugh MacDiarmid,
‘The Man in the Moon’

On a Sunday evening in early March, three days short of the full moon, on a day marked by high winds and sudden squalls of icy rain, when thoughts are already turning to the next day’s work ahead, I go upstairs to fetch something from the room where we sleep beneath the eaves, like swallows, a rescued roofspace with a dormer window facing south. I pause, with my finger on the light switch. There is a lozenge of moonlight on the floor, bright enough to cast my shadow across the bed when I step forwards. I push the blind up further to see that the skies have cleared and the moon is sailing free in the frosty air. Instantly I am gripped with the desire to shrug off my usual Sunday-evening routine, to forgo a second glass of wine, a TV show, the gentle slide back into the working week. I want to get outside. The moon will do this to you. But I have no wish to walk in the city tonight, searching for surviving pools of moonlight in the shadow of buildings or parked cars. For some time now the idea has been forming at the back of my mind of taking a night walk up on the Ridgeway, the prehistoric highway that runs along the top of the Chiltern Hills, the nearest point to the city perhaps that might escape the patina created by the street lights which turns the sky to beaten bronze. Putting thoughts of my early start on the morrow out of my head, I decide to drive out to the Uffington White Horse, the largest and oldest prehistoric sculpture in Britain, carved into the downland chalk around 3,000 years ago by a long-vanished people for a purpose that still evades us.